Amid all the tributes to Harold Pinter over the last week, this obituary in The Economist struck me as the most concise and insightful.

In Beckett, a strong influence on Mr Pinter in his beginnings, ordinary conversations would turn metaphysical. His own were packed with menace. Words were offensive, defensive, barriers, knives, stones, a “stratagem” or a “mocking smoke screen”, as he put it, to cover nakedness. Underneath them, something else was being said. Truth was being smothered. He had felt it himself: the suffocation of drama school (abandoned after two terms), or National Service (doggedly resisted, and the fine paid, in 1949), or the bourgeois smugness of the London theatre scene in the late 1950s, which he had tried to explode. Like him, his characters often suddenly made for the window, desperate for air. Or they fell silent. Silence, applied almost musically and poetically, let the dark in. Or the unsaid. 

I also liked this piece by Mark Lawson about how Pinter's dialogue, although it might seem strange written down, was actually a revolution of naturalism.

Some of the dramatist's obituaries treated him as an intellectual obscurist who never quite broke through to the general public; but his plays for ITV in the 1960s were seen by dozens of millions, part of the democratisation of drama that the new medium achieved. Seen now, A Night Out - in which shifty young men keep secrets from craggy but canny matriarchs in exchanges littered with slang, euphemism and stutterings - feels like a Cockney grandma to numerous sitcoms and soap operas, up to EastEnders. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, writers of Hancock's Half-Hour and Steptoe & Son, have acknowledged that in Pinter they recognised a colleague in the project of showing the heights low London speech could reach.

One thing that has been underrated, I think, is Pinter's acting. As Max in The Homecoming on Radio 3 a few years ago he was terrifying, funny, pathetic and completely believable. I would have loved to see him as Roote in The Hothouse.

I never saw him act on stage, but he was in the front row for (excellent) readings of The Room and The Dumb Waiter at the Royal Court Upstairs in 2006. A powerful presence even just seated in the audience.

It's such a pleasure to be bowled over by an author you've never read before. I've just finished Netherland by Joseph O'Neill and feel both moved and inspired.

Dwight Garner sums it up pretty well in The New York Times (although I don't agree with his minor criticisms at the end).

In some ways it reminded me of an Ian McEwan novel - lots of cool writing and forensic detail - but more compelling and truthful for me than any McEwan.

Astonishing that it didn't make the shortlist for the Booker.

After the first half of Harold Pinter's The Hothouse at the National last year, my Dad asked a woman who had laughed loudly the whole way through if she thought it was a comedy. No! she exclaimed, frowning. And shuffled off to get an ice cream.

That, I suppose, is Pinter for you. She probably didn't even realise she was laughing.  (And, presumably now self-conscious, didn't laugh once in the second half.)

Watching August: Osage County a few weeks ago I was all too aware that I wasn't laughing, since everyone else in the Lyttleton was. Riotously.

I'm not really sure why my view of the play was so different from the vast majority of audiences and critics. But I'm pretty sure that no one would have had any doubt that they had found it funny.

Hothouse photo by Catherine Ashmore/National Theatre

Are competitions like the one being run by The Guardian, inviting people to make a film inspired by Mark Ravenhill's story(with a prize of work experience at Channel 4) really in keeping with the spirit of YouTube?

Who's to say. Let's just hope they uncover a filmmaker as good as  Joel Moss Levinson (who, apparently, has made $200,000 from his corporate competition videos) . In fact, his films are so imbued with YouTubeishness that I can't quite believe he's for real.

(If he is the new Lonelygirl, then let it be recorded that I was the first to say so.)

What exactly are you looking for from an interview with a writer?

Insights into their work? Views on other writers? Opinions on issues of the day?

I admit that I fell eagerly onto Robert McCrum's interview with Philip Roth in today's Observer, and, in many ways, it was a job well done.

We learned about Roth's domestic arrangements (he lives alone in Connecticut for most of the year), his work habits (he writes every day) and his growing isolation (contemporaries like Miller, Styron and Mailer keep dying).

But, though The Observer billed it as "an extraordinary interview with America's greatest living novelist", the obvious truth is that if you want to know about a writer you should read their books. Basically, Roth reveals nothing of significance. Why should he?

Here are the blinding insights from the end of the interview.

Does he, I wonder, regret not having children? 'Well, I don't seem to go around regretting it, no. I was busy doing other things, you know, and then the opportunity slipped away because of age and the age of the women I was with.'

He still likes to exercise. Most days, while it's warm, he'll swim in his pool at the bottom of the garden.

So, now we know.

Hidden away half-way through the interview, however, is something surprising: McCrum's swift dismissal of much of Roth's work.

From his middle age, many novels of Roth's literary self-obsession do not weather well. They seem contrived, and rather lacking in humanity. At this point in the game, perhaps the best you can say is that he still harbours an ambition for simple greatness that has, thus far, seemed to slip through his fingers.

Roth, we later learn 'does not bother with reviews', so perhaps this is McCrum's assertion of his own significance - able to bring 'America's greatest living novelist' down to size (although not to his face).

The final paragraph has a slightly similar feel. McCrum gets his copy of Roth's latest book signed (!) and then:

As I turn the car in the short driveway I see an old grey man walking slowly through the trees back to his studio for the inevitable rendezvous with his desk, a writer happily alone with his many selves, all passion spent.

All passion spent? There's nothing about Roth's recent writing, or what he says to McCrum, that suggest that to me.

I was reminded of Anne Enright's hilarious essay about book readings, and the question and answer session that inevitably follows.

"Why are you so bitter?" says the woman in the front row, before they can fumble a mike across to her. She is sitting very straight. She seems to be wearing a hat with flowers and a pheasant in it, but of course she is not - that is just your imagination. "Why are you so bitter?" she says again, louder, just in case you are trying to slither out of it - your bitterness, she means, in case you are trying to wriggle off your own, horrible hook. And it takes you six months to answer her, in your head. "Chekhov wasn't cheerful. Beckett wasn't a barrel of laughs. Why do you want women to be nice, when they write?"
It is, in fact, years before you realise that the real answer is: "Straight back atcha, Missus." Long experience tells you that it is the angry people who ask about anger, the depressed about depression, the tender-hearted about love. This is the writer as mirror, and a dark mirror at that. "How do you get away with saying what I only feel?"

So what do McCrum's questions and observations say about him?

Every few months I scroll down my favourites and find Elyse Sewell's Journal lurking down towards the bottom.

I can't remember how I found it but she's a model who became semi-famous, apparently, for appearing in the first series of America's Next Top Model.

Her Journal records the ordinary life of a working model, made extraordinary by the fact that she's mostly working in China and South East Asia.

So it's a great travelogue and an insight into a strangely fascinating profession. But, most of all, she takes great photos.

Specialities include the weird use of English in non-English speaking countries...

...and extreme close-ups of food.

Not an all together successful 65-minutes of Pinter - more, I think, because of the venue (too much space in the Lyttleton for such a claustrophobic play) and the performance of Simon Russell Beale than because of the play itself.

Some people have suggested that it's better as a radio play (as originally intended) but I'm not so sure. It's classic  Pinter - a domestic setting into which ever-more menacing elements of threat and emotional instability are introduced.

I just didn't believe in Russell Beale. He was too naturalistic, somehow. And, though I felt he was trying not to be - still too ironic. Not enough menace. I kept imagining how Pinter would have played the role himself.

Clearly, acting in Pinter is a real test. You have to be spot on with everything, I think, or it just seems odd. Claire Higgins was exceptionally good - making the transition from tame 1950s housewife to some sort of sexual predator completely convincing.

Interesting how similar the play is to The City - right down to the identity swap at the end. Given that A Slight Ache was written 50 years ago, and Martin Crimp is considered one of the current avant garde, it just shows how long Pinter's shadow is.

Endnote: two lines in particular made me laugh out loud. The first (Edward: Horseflies suck) probably depends on context. The second (Flora: We'll call the police. Or the vicar) doesn't.

I'm currently midway through watching the 10th episode of the Second Heimat (they're each two hours long so sometimes I need a break).

Once again I'm struck by how such a rambling story can feel so focussed. How such beautiful direction can feel so natural. How life seems to unfurl as art.

Back in 1993, the critic Barry Frogan pinpointed "Reitz's ability to create characters who, like those of Dickens, invaded one's consciousness and resided there from week to week," and it's true that watching is somehow like being in a dream. There's rarely much obvious drama but you are always completely involved.

Strange to read how the first series (which is equally good) came about:

Appropriately, the catalyst for Heimat was a cliche-ridden American TV miniseries called Holocaust that Reitz saw on television in the late-1970s, which he felt traduced German history in the Nazi era. At the time, Reitz had retreated to the North Sea island of Sylt in order to write poetry. He had ostensibly given up his career in cinema - one that started with a bang when his debut Mahlzeiten (Mealtimes), a love story about a couple that ends with the man's suicide, won the best first film award at Venice in 1967. Like Fassbinder and Herzog, he seemed to be a titan of the new German cinema. By the late-1970s, though, he appeared to be washed up: critically mauled for his 1978 film, The Tailor of Ulm, deep in debt and out of ideas. He vowed never to make another film. Snowed-in at his island retreat, however, he watched TV and saw something that revolted him back into film-making.

The sentimentalism of the Holocaust series made him reflect on German history, but also on his own biography. Reitz had been born in 1932 in a Rhineish village called Morbach, leaving home at 19 in order to pursue an artistic career. He had thus rejected his Heimat, a German word that means homeland, connoting one's spiritual roots, but that also signifies a place of innocence and childhood security. As with many of the characters in Heimat, he often felt an unfulfillable desire to return.

He started to make notes. Soon Reitz had a 250-page draft story set in a fictionalised version of his own village. He collaborated with writer Peter Steinbach, and that story became a 2,000-page screenplay.

Watching this evening I was reminded of comments made by Jane Tranter, Controller of BBC Fiction (which means she's in charge of TV drama) in a speech last month:

"In the modern world of endless media possibilities we can help a drama to succeed by encouraging it to be succinct, to declare its intent, to make its premise clear.

"This is absolutely not, repeat not, about making dramas that are high concept (hard to think of an aim more liable in TV terms to feel hollow and manufactured and fail). It's about ensuring that the heart of the drama is not only true, but is not opaquely or perversely hidden.

"Dennis Potter once said if you can "grab an audience by the hand, you can take them wherever you want". Absolutely. But if you can't grab hold of their hand in the first place because they haven't got a clue whose hand they're holding and why, then the drama will be making its interesting journey of revelation and insight all on its own. In which case it might have been easier, let alone cheaper, to write a novel."

I wonder how she'd respond to receiving a 2,000 page screenplay about life in a provincial village...

The titilation of counterfactual history is probably best avoided, but I enjoyed this example by John Lanchester in his review of John Prescott's memoirs.

"There is one fascinating counterfactual to emerge from Prezza. It concerns the incident when he punched an egg-throwing protester in Wales during the 2001 general election.

"He includes a photo of the punch, a solid left jab right on the man's chin. There was a furore, which Prescott survived because the public (not the papers, not at first) were largely on his side. But Prescott was an amateur boxer in his youth, and on page 118-19 there is a photo of him landing what looks like a knockout punch on an opponent. He is right-handed, and the knockout punch was a right.

"Here is the counter-factual: if 16-stone Prescott had hit the egg-thrower with his right, he would have knocked him out, and quite likely have broken his jaw. If either of those things had happened – if the man had ended up in hospital – Prescott would have had to resign. Whoever Blair appointed as his new deputy prime minister would have had much less pull with the party, because no one had as much pull with the party as Prescott.

"So when the crucial vote on the Iraq war came, Blair wouldn't have had a deputy able to bring the party onside in the way that Prescott did. Instead of 139 Labour MPs voting against the war, a majority of them would have voted against, Blair would (as he said in private) have had to resign, and we wouldn't have gone to war.

"And all because, for once, a New Labour figure didn't lean to the right."

Having written a play about it, I now find myself drawn to any story about Thatcher's death.

The report in The Mail on Sunday yesterday that "Margaret Thatcher is to be given the ultimate accolade of a State funeral when she reaches the end of her days" is certainly a new development.

Back in 2006, Downing Street explicitly denied that any such plans were in place. Now, however, according to the Mail: "plans are under way for her funeral, when the time eventually comes, to take place at St Paul’s Cathedral...

"[and] the Queen has also given her permission for Lady Thatcher to lie in the Chapel of St Mary’s Undercroft immediately beneath Westminster Hall on the night before her funeral."

Apparently "Overall arrangements for the funeral are being led by Sir Malcolm Ross, the Queen’s former Master of the Royal Household" and Gordon Brown has given his approval.

I wonder if Mrs T gets consulted.